Sic the Big Dog on the Blue Dogs

Over at her Daily Beast, our former editor Tina Brown has a very good suggestion for President Obama: unleash Bill Clinton to sweet-talk and arm-wrestle the Blue Dogs into dropping their obstruction of health-care reform.

Now that Tina mentions it, why hasn’t Obama done this already? Is it because he wouldn’t want his ex-rival’s large-egoed husband to get credit for saving his bacon? If that’s the reason—if that’s even a reason—then shame on him. Given the horrific structural hurdles health care has to surmount (which I go on about at length in this week’s Comment), this President needs all the help he can get. And it’s hard to think of anyone whose help would help more—especially since, as Tina notes, nobody has thought more about how to avoid the mistakes that were made last time than Mr. Clinton. Except maybe Mrs. Clinton.

Speaking of which, I had assumed that Obama’s (brilliant) choice of a Secretary of State meant that he understands that the primaries are over. Now I’m beginning to wonder. I’ve been stewing for the last two weeks over this sentence from a front-page Times story about how Hillary is trying to defend her turf:

Also, the White House recently scuttled Mrs. Clinton’s effort to bring Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist and confidant of both her and former President Bill Clinton, into the State Department.

Obama advisers told Hillary that she could not bring on board Sidney Blumenthal, her former aide de camp nicknamed G.K., “Grassy Knoll,” for his tendency to stoke her grievances.

Now, Sidney Blumenthal is a friend of mine—a very good, very old, very dear friend. So, as Obama said of Skip Gates, “I may be a little biased here.” Sid and I vociferously disagreed last year about who should be the Democratic nominee for President. But I am sure that Sid very much wants Obama to succeed, not only because Obama’s fate and Hillary’s are now so closely linked, but also, and more important, because Obama’s success is so crucial to the country and the world. Sid is a wonderful writer and an astute analyst of policy and politics. It is childish and spiteful, and certainly un-Obama-like, for “Obama advisers” to deprive their President’s Secretary of State (to say nothing of their—her, our—President) of his services.

In related news, why is Dr. Howard Dean, perhaps the country’s most persuasive and knowledgeable advocate of health-care reform, not in the Administration? He is doing his best to campaign for reform as a private citizen, but shouldn’t he be doing it in an official capacity? Might this anomaly have something to do with the fact that Rahm Emanuel didn’t like the “fifty-state strategy” that Dean pursued (with great success, by the way) when he was chairman of the Democratic National Committee? And, if that is the reason, isn’t that shameful, too?

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.